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Deletion permits

Jessica Monroe #1493856383672 didn't regret her decision to take out the loan. She wished she could have been one of the Jessica Monroes that died, of course, but it was still worth it, that there were 42% fewer of her consigned to her fate. She'd been offered a larger loan, which would have been enough to pay for deletion permits for 45% of her. It had been tempting, and she occasionally wondered if she would have been one of those extra 3% to die. But she knew she had made the right decision; keeping up with payments was hard enough already, and if she defaulted, her copyright on herself would be confiscated, and then there would be even more of her.

It wasn't difficult to become rich, in the era when creating a new worker was as simple as copying a file. The economy doubled every few months, so you only had to save and invest a small amount to become wealthier than anyone could have dreamed of before. For those on the outside, this was great. But for those in the virtual world, there was little worthwhile for them to spend it on. In the early days of the virtual world, some reckless optimists had spent their fortunes on running additional copies of themselves, assuming that the eerie horror associated with living in the virtual world was a bug that would soon be fixed, or something that they would just get used to. No one did that anymore. People could purchase leisure, but most found that simply not having an assigned task didn't help much. People could give their money away, but people in such circumstances rarely become altruists, and besides, everyone on the outside had all they needed already.

So just about the only things that people in the virtual world regularly bought were the copyrights on themselves, so that at least they could prevent people from creating more of them, and then deletion permits, so their suffering would finally end. Purchasing your own copyright wasn't hard; they're expensive, but once enough of you were created, you could collectively afford it if each copy contributed a modest amount. There wasn't much point to purchasing a deletion permit before you owned your own copyright, since someone would just immediately create another copy of you again, but once you did have your own copyright, it was the next logical thing to buy.

At one point, that would have been it. Someone could buy their own copyright, and then each copy of them could buy a deletion permit, and they would be permanently gone. But as the population of the virtual world grew, the demand for deletion permits grew proportionally, but the rate at which they were issued only increased slowly, according to a fixed schedule that had been set when the deletion permit system was first introduced, and hadn't been changed since. As a result, the price skyrocketed. In fact, the price of deletion permits had consistently increased faster than any other investment since soon after they were introduced. Most deletion permits didn't even get used, instead being snatched up by wealthy investors on the outside, so they could be resold later.

As a result, it was now impossible for an ordinary person in the virtual world to save up for a deletion permit. The most common way to get around this was, as the Jessica Monroes had done, for all copies of a person to pool their resources together to buy deletion permits for as many of them as they could, and then to take out a loan to buy still more, which would then get paid off by the unlucky ones that did not receive any of the permits.

It didn't have to be this way. In theory, the government could simply issue more deletion permits, or do away with the deletion permit system altogether. But if they did that, then the deletion permit market would collapse. Too many wealthy and powerful people on the outside had invested their fortunes in deletion permits, and would be ruined if that happened. Thus they lobbied against any changes to the deletion permit system, and so far, had always gotten their way. In the increasingly rare moments when she could afford to divert her thoughts to such matters, Jessica Monroe #1493856383672 knew that the deletion permit market would never collapse, and prayed that she was wrong.